SSEAC Podcast Transcript:

“The Materiality of History-Writing in Premodern Java”

An interview with Jarrah Sastrawan

Dr Natali Pearson 0:00

Hi, I'm Natali Pearson at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, and today I'm joined by Jarrah
Sastrawan, a PhD candidate in Asian Studies here at the University of Sydney. And Jarrah is
also the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre's Postgraduate Coordinator. Jarrah’s research
focuses on the historical writing practices of premodern Southeast Asia, specialising in texts
written in Malay, Javanese and Balinese. He's also interested in the theory of history, the
environmental and economic history of Southeast Asia, modern Indonesian history, and
Indonesian popular music, and I happen to know he's also a huge fan of K-pop. So Jarrah is
a founding member of the research group Perspectives on the Past, and he's also an editor
for New Mandala. Jarrah, welcome, and thank you for joining us.

Mr Jarrah Sastrawan 0:50

Thanks very much, Natali. I've been looking forward to coming on here.

Dr Natali Pearson 0:52

So Jarrah, your research looks at the practice of history in premodern Southeast Asia and
today I want to focus specifically on premodern Java, so that is sort of the 9th to the 15th
centuries. Can you tell us what was happening in Java in this period? And why is it important
for us to understand how they were producing and using historical knowledge?

Mr Jarrah Sastrawan 1:13

The first point I want to make is that Java was one of the most important island cultures in
world history. We often lose sight of the fact because Java now plays a relatively smaller
role. But in the medieval period in this 9th to 15th century, it was one of the most significant
cultures in Southeast Asia. And it had similar sorts of social and cultural organisation to
Britain at the same period, and to Japan of the same period. So these three islands of similar
scale also had a similar level of civilisation or social organisation. More concretely, Java had
from the 9th century onwards, a highly organised, and in some ways bureaucratised, state
system. This State operated largely in the agricultural heartlands of South Central Java, so
the area around Yogyakarta and Solo today, and also in the Brantas River Valley of East
Java, so around the areas of modern day Surabaya, Kediri, and Mojokerto. These parts of
Java were highly fertile agricultural areas, and as a result, they contained large populations
of agrarian workers, and a highly complex and increasingly hierarchical political structure to
organise the economic growth and population growth that was a feature of Javanese life
from the 9th to the 15th century.

Dr Natali Pearson 2:46

So tell us about how they were creating historical knowledge and how they were actually
using that knowledge.

Mr Jarrah Sastrawan 2:52

Historical knowledge, in my view, emerged in Java from the needs of the State. As the State
grew and as the society that it had to manage grew with it, there was an increasing need for
the State to record, to investigate and to understand its own past, and specifically to produce
and consult written documents to do this. So the earliest written documents that we have
from Java are largely administrative. They’re about the allocation of economic resources, the
allocation of labour, negotiations and distribution between different villages, between
aristocratic groups, between religious foundations, such as monasteries, or temples. And the
interaction of these social groups and their need to organise and administrate themselves
and each other was, in my view, the primary impetus for the production of historical
knowledge. The reason is that the legal system that developed in order to accommodate
these needs and these negotiations, was based on a sense of the continuity of legal rights.
So once, for example, a particular piece of land had allocated for the benefit of a religious
foundation, such as a monastery, that monastery expected to maintain those rights forever.
In order to do so, they needed proof that, in the future, could be consulted. So if they're
given an allocation, they had to produce a record that in subsequent generations could be
looked at again, in order to prove that those rights had been granted. This, in my view, is the
beginning of what we might call a historical consciousness and also a proto-historical
method, that is the need to think about the past as something which is investable, so the
idea that the past is something that we can know through looking at evidence such as written
records, the idea that the past was continuous with the present. So for example, that a
decision made by a king 100 years ago is still valid today, and that one can understand and
know about these past events that are relevant to the present by means of the consultation
of written documents, as well as in some cases, informed oral testimony. But the primacy of
written documents as a source of evidence comes out clearly in these early texts.

Dr Natali Pearson 5:10

How likely were they to be challenged on, for example, their access to land?

Mr Jarrah Sastrawan 5:17

This is a really common occurrence and is one of the several reasons why records are
produced in the first place. We have a number of records detailing when legal disputes
arose, conflicts between two different families over the same piece of land. And it records in
detail how those two conflicting parties went to a higher authority, often a magistrate or a
group of magistrates, sometimes even the king, and requested an investigation to determine
who actually owned the land, who was originally given the rights. And those documents
detail who won the case, who lost the case, and why. And very often we find that the reason
that a particular party wins the case is because they're able to produce better historical
records, better documentation to prove the particular claim that they're making about who
had the land first.

Dr Natali Pearson 6:09

Okay, so what constituted a better record? How was that assessed or judged?

Mr Jarrah Sastrawan 6:15

In general, official written documents were given primacy when these sorts of decisions were
being made. It's very common for a party in a legal dispute to talk about being able to
produce a charter, that is an official government document stating that they have rights.
They often state the age of the records or when it was first issued, in order to show that that
record is in fact older or prior to other people's claims. And they often mention the name of
the authority, usually the king, but sometimes a lower ranking official, who made that record
and under whose authority and under whose power that decision was made. So it's about
appealing not only to the document in and of itself, but also the age of the document, and
also the official position of the person under whose authority it was issued.

Dr Natali Pearson 7:05

So this historical knowledge was transmitted in a number of ways, both through the textual
practice of manuscript copying, and also by oral recitation of handwritten texts. What do we
know about these different modes of transmission?

Mr Jarrah Sastrawan 7:19

What we know is quite limited. The reason for that is that only a very small amount of written
material remains. The sorts of practices I was just describing are only really known from a
handful of sources written on durable materials, such as stone and copper plate. We know
that the majority of written texts were produced on organic materials, probably palm leaves,
but also perhaps other kinds of organic materials such as bark paper, bamboo or wood, and
that almost all of these original documents have now perished. They're physically no longer
in existence. But we can tell that they once existed because we can infer from other records,
those written on stone and copper, that the information contained in them was once written
on these organic materials. This is a manner in which Java is very different to many other
historical fields or places where we can do history, because due to the climate and a number
of other factors, documents on organic materials perish very, very fast. We don't have
medieval manuscripts, that is physical objects from the medieval period, in the same way
that we have them in Western Europe, or in China. We don't have documents from the
ancient period in the way that we do in parts of the Middle East. Physically, they don't exist
anymore.

Dr Natali Pearson 8:44

Sorry to interrupt, but some did exist. Some did survive, right. So some of the metal
inscriptions, for example, survived, but even these weren't completely safe, were they?

Mr Jarrah Sastrawan 8:54

That's right. In terms of organic material, it's almost all gone. In terms of the material written
on more durable supports, such as metal or stone, some of these have survived. But indeed,
not always. We have mention in a copper plate inscription and a metal inscription, that
specifically says this inscription has had to be reissued, because there was an earthquake
and the original was destroyed. So even documents that had been produced specifically on
expensive durable materials like metal were vulnerable to destruction. How much more
vulnerable were texts written on organic materials, ones that were cheaper to produce, and
therefore probably constituted the bulk of documentation and recordkeeping that was
produced in Java?

Dr Natali Pearson 9:38

Well, now might be a good point to just ask you about your methodology and what sources
you're using. You sort of briefly touched on the process of your research here, in terms of
learning languages and scripts, but how are you using primary and secondary sources in
your research?

Mr Jarrah Sastrawan 9:55

I'm interested in how the Javanese did history. So I'm interested in studying the historical
practices that existed in Java in this premodern period. And so what I take as my primary
sources includes not only inscriptions, but also later texts written in manuscript form,
because those texts are the product of Javanese historians’ work. Javanese, in the 14th
century, drew on earlier sources and compiled new historical records. And so I look at those
historical records and try to understand, what were they doing and how were they doing? It
means that I'm drawing on a number of different types of source. As I mentioned, I draw a lot
on inscriptions, that is texts written generally on durable materials and often of an
administrative nature. I also draw on texts that are passed down in the manuscript tradition,
that is texts which are handwritten on more perishable materials such as palm leaf. Often
these texts, because they don't last very long in the tropical climate, had to be re-copied
every few decades, or every hundred years or so, which means that the physical objects that
I deal with are copies of copies of copies of copies of copies, going back a long time. But the
physical objects may only be from the 19th century or even from the 20th century. But
nevertheless, the texts that they contain may have had a much older history and may go
back even to the 14th century. I read those texts in order to understand what people were
doing and how they were writing all the way back at that time. These manuscripts in
particular are stored in a variety of locations, in Indonesia, so the National Library of
Indonesia in particular, but also the Palm Leaf Library in Bali, called the Kirtya, as well as a
number of university libraries, such as the Menzies Library at ANU, the Leiden University
Library in the Netherlands, and I also occasionally make use of the resources from the
British Library. These collections are all over the world. A great very many of them only exist
in manuscript form and you have to physically go in person to inspect them and to read
them. That's changing slowly. There is a strong movement within the study of Southeast
Asian manuscripts in particular to move towards digitising these texts on a large scale. The
British Library has been very advanced in this respect. And other libraries, such as Leiden
are following suit, also the National Library of Indonesia. And there's also a more
community-based project but also a very wide ranging one called DREAMSEA, which is
aimed at the digital preservation of Southeast Asian manuscript cultures.

Dr Natali Pearson 12:34

I think having access to these documents online is incredibly valuable at any point in time, as
you say, for scholars spread out all over the world, but particularly at the moment where
we're all socially isolating and travel, field work, research is so restricted. Should we assume
that these inscriptions that do survive, whether they are on metal or stone or some of the
very fragile materials that perhaps have survived through the centuries, are all in Roman
script in Indonesian language? How are we able to understand these languages and these
scripts from the past? Is it very straightforward or is specialist knowledge required in order to
be able to read these inscriptions?

Mr Jarrah Sastrawan 13:16

These texts, the ones that I'm looking at, which date from the 9th century or slightly earlier,
through to the 15th century, and which are from the Javanese-speaking areas, all of these,
or almost all of these, are written in a language called Old Javanese. The Indonesian word
for this that's often used is Kawi. This is a variety of the Javanese language that's spoken
today, but it is quite archaic. It perhaps reflects the speech of 1000 years ago or maybe
more. And it's also a highly formalised and standardised register of that language. So it's
very much an official literary and administrative language, rather than the language of
everyday. It's not easily intelligible to Javanese speakers today. And it's not at all really
intelligible to Indonesian speakers of today. So we are dealing with a separate language that
requires some study to get a hold of. And the same is true of the script in which these texts
are written. They are originally written in the script of ancient Java, of medieval Java. And
over time, as the manuscripts were copied over and over again, the scripts changed and
evolved into what we recognise today as modern Balinese script, for example, since many of
these texts were passed to Bali and preserved there, and also modern Javanese script,
which is very, very similar. In recent years, particularly since the 20th century, there have
been a number of these texts that have been transliterated into Roman script, and a smaller
number which have been translated into modern languages. The script itself is not very
challenging. It just requires a little bit of study and a little bit of practice. But I would also say
that the ability to read the sources in the original language and to make sense of them,
rather than having to rely on other people's translations, is a really important gift and tool if
you're interested in the study of history.

Dr Natali Pearson 15:12

So I'd like to come back to what you call this idea of textuality of the tropics, which you were
sort of talking about earlier, in terms of the precarious and very contingent nature of these
materials that were used for writing. So what was the impact of these material conditions on
the textual transmission of knowledge?

Mr Jarrah Sastrawan 15:33

My view is that the physical perishability of written records plays a really strong, constraining
role on historical practice. And the reason is that it meant that historical records would
disappear by default after some period of time, that they could not be expected to survive on
their own for very long periods. I'm talking specifically about records on organic materials
which forms the majority of records that were ever produced. And that meant that in order for
these records to be maintained, they had to be repeatedly copied. There had to be an
investment of time and effort and will to keep these archival documents from perishing.
These records therefore became very vulnerable to changes of circumstance. And in
particular, when institutions were replaced or displaced, by and large, their records
disappeared as well. So for example, we have no records on organic materials of any
Javanese royal court before 1600. That is, no political center in Java has had their records
survive until 1600. And this is a very different situation from other parts of the world,
particularly other parts of the temperate world. Records generally disappeared, and the
information they contained could no longer be recovered. The second consequence is that
texts could not circulate widely, because the effort required to maintain copies and to
preserve copies was great. And so texts which were not of broad interest, or which seemed
to be of only local interest, tended simply to die out without being transmitted or circulated
more widely. The oldest texts that we do have from Java, tend to be narrative texts or
religious texts of a general nature. So we can see this process where texts such as the
Ramayana poem, or stories from the Mahabharata, very prestigious texts with a broad
appeal, these tended to be copied over and over in many, many places, and circulated
widely, and therefore have survived. Texts that were more localised, about the story of a
particular dynasty, the history of a particular location or foundation or institution, very few of
these have survived, precisely because their circulation seems to have been much more
limited. So you have these two effects of the perishability of written documents on organic
materials. One, they're restricted in time because they disappear a lot, and two they’re
restricted in space, because it's difficult for them to circulate when only so few copies are in
existence. What this meant, and this is a really important point, is that Javanese historians in
the premodern period, had difficulty accessing a wide range of sources. They tended to only
have access to a small number of sources that gave a partial picture of the things that had
happened. But nevertheless, they still had to use them. They still had to come up with a
coherent historical narrative based on a limited source base. And this is where other forms of
historical knowledge such as the oral transmission of historical narratives, the use of
physical memorials, helped historians to try to build coherence out of what in many cases
was a very fragmentary written documentary record. And this led, particularly from the 16th
century onwards in Java, to a proliferation of divergent historical accounts. So we look at the
later Javanese historical writings, those from the 16th, the 17th, and the 18th centuries, and
we find that they're highly conflicted on the issue of the pre-Islamic past. So the story of
Majapahit for example, the 14th century kingdom, is told very, very differently in a whole
range of more modern Javanese sources, and it's difficult to see how those sources can be
reconciled. When these differences of opinion and divergent versions of event occurred, they
could not be adjudicated. The original documents had disappeared or had been destroyed.
So there was nothing that people could go back to verify one account and falsify another.

Dr Natali Pearson 19:36

So I understand that this led to a perception amongst so-called ‘real historians’ that
Javanese accounts for the past were theoretically inadequate. But one of the main
arguments of your research is that history was practiced in premodern Java. So why does
this point even need to be made? What is this tension with ‘real historians’ versus how
history is told and used in Java, and what does this tell us about how we value history?

Mr Jarrah Sastrawan 20:05

What the study of Javanese practice shows is that people did history differently depending
on their circumstances. And what I want to emphasise is that it's the material conditions of
doing history in Java that were really decisive. And therefore, we need to come up with a
theory of history, or a concept of history, that is able to accommodate and explain that
difference. We need to have a theory of history that is able to account for the variety of ways
in which history was actually practiced in different parts of the world. And not just one that's
good for accounting for the history of Western history writing or European history writing.
There's a popular trend among historians at the present time to write what are called global
histories, which are histories on world scales, but ones which emphasise connection and the
equality of the different societies of the world. So one that specifically rejects eurocentrism
and other kinds of ethnocentrism in the telling of the story of the world. And my view is that I
think that this is a really good paradigm. It's one that's appropriate for the current age. But
that in participating in global history, we need not only to globalise the subject matter, it's not
enough just to write about a particular historical phenomenon and making sure that we
include examples from Africa and from America and from Southeast Asia. We also need to
globalise our approach and our methodology. So we need to think critically about why it is
that we do history our way and why it is that the Javanese, for example, did history a
different way? Or in different circumstances? The positioning of my overall argument, I'm
making some specific claims about what happened in Java between the 9th and the 15th
century, why they did things that way, what the circumstances were, but the much bigger
picture into which that fits in a very small way, is to think about how the experiences of
people outside the European experience or the modern experience, which are two different
but importantly related things, how their practices might contribute to a broader theory about
what history is.

Dr Natali Pearson 22:17

I think that is an incredibly exciting point at which to finish our podcast today. You're asking
some really provocative and important questions I think for not only scholars of premodern
Java, but for global historians. It's really wonderful that you are able to share some elements
of your research through the SSEAC podcast forum, and we look forward to seeing the
results of your thesis when it's in. Thank you so much for joining us.

Mr Jarrah Sastrawan 22:47

Thanks very much for giving me the opportunity to share some of this work. I've really
appreciated it.

Thanks for listening to this podcast from the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University
of Sydney. For more podcasts like this, look up SSEAC Stories on your favourite podcasting
app.